Abstract
Sexual offenders (SOs) are increasing in number in the United States and throughout the world. Technological progress, especially that involving computers and the Internet, facilitates their antisocial behavior as they visit chat rooms and various other cyber sites searching for prey—children, adolescents, and young adults. They have created a billion dollar industry of pornographic images. These images are frequently shown as they attempt to establish personal contact with future victims.
As of January 2012, there were 747,408 registered SOs in the United States, about 8,000 more than in 2011 (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 2012). A small percentage of SOs, classified as sexually violent predators (SVPs) and most likely to reoffend, are in special institutions constructed and organized by the 20 states that currently have civil commitment laws for sexual predators. As of autumn 2006, offenders who had been civilly committed as SVPs under these laws numbered almost 2,700 (James, Thomas, & Foley, 2007). Although these laws are questioned by many scholars, they have been found to be constitutional by the United States Supreme Court. The SOs, who decry the law as unconstitutional and as a form of preventive detention, claim that they have completed the prison time to which they were sentenced and are detained allegedly for treatment they should have received during their sentencing period. The treatment may last indefinitely, because they are assessed as still dangerous and as uncooperative with the treatment program. Because of this, great care must be taken in diagnosing individual SOs as SVPs.
Although the group of SVP offenders is heterogeneous, each retaining his or her uniqueness, they frequently share certain characteristics: a dysfunctional upbringing, an often-delinquent adolescence, poor school attendance, adult antisocial behaviors, previous encounters with the law, a history of incarceration, and a proclivity to reoffend. In addition, many have little or no current family life or family support. Of course, there is the extant sexual offense that led to prison. Behind the offense, there is the offender: a loner, dissatisfied, and socially unpredictable individual, frequently moody or angry. He may be suffering from a mental disorder, varying from a personality disorder, with paranoid or narcissistic features, associated with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) or psychopathy. Some are depressed, manic, or bipolar; a few have a history of psychosis. Some are cognitively impaired due to cerebral traumas incurred at some time during their life, impulsive, and agitated. Many have a history of drug and alcohol addiction. In summary, the SO who ends up civilly committed as a SVP usually has (a) a conviction for a felony sexual offense, often repetitive over a period of years; (b) the presence of a mental disorder that predisposes to offend and incapacitates to such a degree that he is unable to refrain from offending; and (c) a high probability of recidivism due to a mental disorder (ASPD, psychopathy, or a psychotic state; Palermo & Farkas, in press).
In this issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Sean Jumper and colleagues discuss the diagnostic profiles of civilly committed SOs. In a very methodical way, they analyze the records of 377 men, civilly committed under the Illinois SVP Act, and compare the diagnostic profiles with civilly committed SVPs in six other states and with some international samples. Following their analysis, they draw a national composite of the offenders’ characteristics and diagnostics. The reader will be interested in the comparative study and in the profile the authors make. They will see that pedophilia and paraphilia NOS were equally diagnosed in the offenders in the states they took into consideration and that the ASPD diagnostic rate was basically similar in all states except Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Because of the small sample size, the authors were unable to make a very important comparison between SVPs and other sex offenders (for previous research on this topic, see Levenson, 2004). Indeed, to learn what distinguishes the SVPs who are to be civilly committed from other SOs who are usually discharged after completion of their sentence is of the utmost importance from a diagnostic point of view. Does the difference lie in the type of offense, the repeated number of offenses, a serious mental disorder, the presence of psychopathy with a Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R) score that may reach 30+, and the refusal of treatment due to a paranoid attitude? Extended investigation of this dilemma will help find the answer to the above. For now, as they state, the national composite of offenders is important not only for use in ultimate comparative analysis but also for eventual better management of these offenders.
We appreciate this very stimulating article and we are also of the opinion that the Sex Offender Civil Commitment Program Network, the organization of professionals who work with SVPs to facilitate collaboration and data collection, should continue its good work. It is possible that such data could eventually become part of a national database useful in the detection of various types of SOs and as a tool for preventing the recidivism of all sex offenders and why not the creation of a mininational Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-like manual for sex offender diagnoses.